Gong Co. is a monumental memento mori to the decline and decay of a family-owned grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, from which the book takes its name.
When Patterson first encountered the store in 2003, it was still open for business but seemingly stuck in time, its shelves scattered with long-expired products — an unintentional time capsule and uncanny fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” Over the next twenty years, Patterson diligently documented the store’s disintegration, through its decline, death, and decay. In 2013, its doors were closed, with its contents left inside. Patterson continued to access the store until the day it was gutted in late 2019, and continued his work in the studio until 2023.
Gong Co. invites readers to engage in a visceral and visual exploration. The book is presented as an aged and worn green, clothbound cover wrapped in a brown paper jacket resembling a grocery sack. Its pages are seemingly foxed and molded, as if caused by heavy southern humidity, now forever embedded into the book’s pages. And through an eclectic mix of on-site and studio photographs, monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages, and cryptic handwritten notes, the book is a multi-layered experience.
The work is many things, all at once. An exploration of how we engage with the artistic representation of America and “the South” — a place shaped in popular imagination by great photographers and writers like William Eggleston, Walker Evans, and William Faulkner among others. A reflection on 20th-century America, all we bought, and all we left behind. But perhaps more than anything, Gong Co. is an existential allegory, as Patterson delves deeply into the impermanence of it all, and of a now long-outworn sense of America itself.
TBW Books & Éditions Images Vevey, 2024
Casebound hardcover with French fold dust jacket
9 x 11 in / 23 x 28 cm
224 pages, 164 color plates
US/Japan – TBW Books – ISBN 978-1-942953-67-8
Europ/UK – Édition Images Vevey – ISBN 978-2-940624-28-7
